@Makyen I've noticed that there's a bunch of these types of sites, either <something>.tutorials24x7.com or <language>tpoint.com - often they seem to be used legitimately, and look like useful resources - especially javatpoint which seems to be a fairly popular resource - but I'm never sure what to consider spam/not spam

@angussidney Yeah, these types of sites can really blur the lines. It's even seemed that there have been some sites that have progressed from being promoted to being actual resources that are used by many people, as the site has become more popular and obtained better content.

Where the line is isn't clear. My take on it is that we should be continuing to assume good faith and only start calling it spam and/or flagging when there's a pattern of promoting the same site by the same individual in posts that are at or below the minimum quality needed for an actual question or answer. This can be difficult to determine when it is promotion, but the person spreads it out across multiple accounts. In such cases, custom flag and let a moderator look at it with more info.

For this particular one, it could be someone that likes the site, but who consistently posts very low quality answers. OTOH, if it was just a user that wasn't trying to promote the site, I'd expect the user to learn a bit about what was needed from having their first 1–5 answers deleted shortly after being posted. Either way, the user should be informed of the policies for link-only answers and for promotion. Hopefully, they will learn and contribute good content.

@SmokeDetector although the post suggests that it's linking to an unoffical ISO download, that isn't the case - the website is a blog post with instructions on how to install Ubuntu, and links directly to the official sources for drivers and ISOs

@Undo Could you stop and start the MS instance that actually makes requests to the SE API for flagging? Or, at least I'm assuming that stop/start results in the instance being assigned a different IP address (it does for my use of AWS EC2). If it doesn't get a different IP address, then don't bother, as a new IP address is what's desired.

It appears that the machine doing the flagging has tripped some rate-limit for the SE API. This is certainly a possibility, as I'm not sure if backoff is even sent as an early indicator when using different user-tokens.

Hmmm... It looks like an error I'd expect if you hit one of the hard rate-limits. It's definitely not the normal response for using up quota, as the quota response tells you how many seconds until you can try again.

@Undo Hmmm... yeah, if it's running through a bunch of users with < 100 associated sites, it looks like it doesn't respect backoff. That might do it, if there are enough, which there likely are. I believe there's at least some permitted, as, theoretically, there could be more requests already in flight when the first backoff is sent. However, my experience is that multiple already in-flight requests may be errored-out, rather each getting a backoff, depending on the number in-flight.

How many requests it takes to get a backoff from the SE API varies dramatically, based on the pattern of requests and server load. I've seen backoff after as few as 7 or 8 requests. Other times, it's taken hundreds of requests prior to getting a backoff.

I'm not sure how long it will take to get out of the current state with SE. If it's automatic, which it probably is, then probably less than 24 hours. For actual backoffs, it's usually <= 30s (10s is the most common backoff value I've seen). For running out of quota, it's until whenever your quota would have rolled over, which is a different time for each IP and token. For this, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm not sure if preventing access to SE will speed up the process. Given that the error doesn't give any information as to how soon it will be functional again, and explicitly says "so try again soon", it seems reasonable to keep trying at a normal level of requests.

@AJ Yeah, that's probably not going to work for an unknown period of time. MS is currently being blocked by the SE API, due to running amok with requests when doing the daily re-confirmation of moderator status.